Cucumber Transplant

On June 28, 2010 I decided the cucumber seedlings were big enough to transplant. My books say that once seedlings of most any kind of plant have put out their second set of "true" leaves (their third set of leaves), they're ready to transplant. The intial pair of leaves are cotyledons and look pretty much the same for all plants. The second pair of leaves look distinctly different and more like the type of plant. If you look hard you can see the cotyledons on the demo-pot seedling- they blend in with the true leaves.

The new seedlings were going into one of my new "Self Watering" window boxes that I ordered from walmart. They were the cheapest 30" window boxes that I could find. I think they're fairly good quality and, besides having to wait half an hour for the people at walmart to pay attention to me, it was a painless purchase.


I wasn't sure how best to transplant the newspaper pots. At first I was going to plant both with and without newspaper. Taking off the newspaper and looking at the root systems was a bit more fun than I thought it'd be. So, all the plants had the newspaper taken off. A few kept the bottoms. NOTE: My vegetable-growers books said NOT to transplant cucumbers like this. They aparently have very tender roots that don't like to be disturbed. If you are starting a cucumber patch of your own, the experts recommend sow them directly into the pot/ground you want to grow them or use biodegradable pots to seed them.

I filled the windowbox about half way with very damp dirt. I wish I had put more in beforehand, so there would be extra room for the roots to explore.

A double seedling pot on the left. Close-up on the right, look at its root! And the seedcase.

There are ten seedlings in this one 30" pot. The books recommend spacing cucumbers about 10" apart since they are heavy feeders and usually sprawl around on the ground. I'm growing mine  up a trellis and supplementing with Osmocote vegetable food. I plan on thinning out the weakling seedlings (yay for rhyme) in a week or so so that I have 3-5 plants. I'm still unsure if they will even fruit.